The letter from the EPA is unambiguous. The 78 acres at 1800 Aluminum Drive in Columbia Falls do not pose "an estimated lifetime cancer risk above de minimis levels" from anything left behind by the aluminum plant that used to sit there. That finding, part of the agency's Record of Decision signed in January 2025, is the reason the Columbia Falls City Council was able to approve Teakettle Heights, a 421-unit subdivision that will become the largest single development the city has ever permitted.
So if you're shopping in this corridor and someone tells you the risk is contamination, they're pointing at the wrong document. The EPA already ruled on that question, in writing, for this specific parcel. The risk that actually shows up in a real estate transaction here is procedural: a well you can't dig, a disclosure clause the city forced into the paperwork, financing terms built around a construction timeline that runs alongside an active federal cleanup next door. None of that will show up in a Zestimate. All of it will show up at closing.
The 78 Acres EPA Actually Cleared
Teakettle Heights sits on land that was part of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company property, the plant that closed in 2009 and had been the county's largest employer back in the 1970s. Glencore, which bought CFAC in 1999, sold roughly 2,000 acres of that land to local developer Mick Ruis, who is building Teakettle Heights through his entity RDT Holdings LLC. Of that purchase, about 1,850 acres will become his personal ranch. The 78.05 acres carved out for Teakettle Heights is a separate, specific parcel that the EPA reviewed and cleared as part of its broader Superfund investigation into the site.
That's an important distinction, because Glencore didn't sell everything. The company kept roughly 200 to 211 acres on the west side of Teakettle Mountain, the section that holds the old landfills and the bulk of the contamination identified in decades of groundwater testing. That retained parcel is where the actual remediation work will happen: a slurry wall around the dumps, improved landfill caps, and long-term monitoring of groundwater that has tested positive for cyanide and fluoride near the old dump sites since at least the early 1990s. The Teakettle Heights parcel is adjacent to that work, not part of it.
The Columbia Falls Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend the project on May 8, 2026, and the city council gave final approval on June 1, with 30 conditions attached. Councilor Kelly King voted against every measure, citing broader concerns about building near an active Superfund site regardless of what the EPA's paperwork said about this particular parcel. She was outvoted. The zoning changed from the county's Light Industrial designation to the city's CR-5 Two-Family Residential, and the project moved forward at a density of 5.4 units per acre, well within the two-to-eight range the city's own growth policy allows for that land.
No Wells Allowed
Here's the condition that actually constrains what you can do with a lot in Teakettle Heights: no one is allowed to dig a water well on the property. The concern isn't that the soil under the homes is contaminated. It's that drawing water from the table beneath the development could pull contaminated groundwater from the east toward the new wells, since the plume from the old landfills runs generally toward the Flathead River.
The practical fix was annexation. Teakettle Heights will run on Columbia Falls' existing municipal sewer and water system, the same system already serving the rest of the city, rather than on private wells or septic. For a buyer, that means one less inspection item to worry about (no well to test, no septic system to evaluate) but it also means the property's water supply is tied to a specific municipal hookup condition written into the approval, not a standard private-well setup you'd find on comparable acreage elsewhere in Flathead County. If you're comparing a Teakettle Heights lot to a similarly priced property on the edge of town with its own well, you're not comparing two versions of the same thing. You're comparing two different utility structures with two different sets of ongoing obligations.
The Clause the City Made the Developer Add
The planning commission's original recommendation didn't require much beyond the standard subdivision conditions. The city council added one that matters more than it sounds like on paper: Teakettle Heights' covenants, conditions and restrictions, and the face of the plat itself, must disclose that the property sits on a former Superfund site. That's not boilerplate. It's a condition the council specifically wrote in after residents raised the issue at both the planning commission and the council hearing, and it means every buyer, every title company, and every future resale in that subdivision will have that disclosure sitting in the recorded documents, not buried in an environmental report you'd have to go looking for.
For a seller in that subdivision down the road, that clause does some of the disclosure work for you. For a buyer today, it means you should read the actual CC&Rs before you write an offer, not just the marketing materials. The EPA's clearance and the disclosure requirement are two different things doing two different jobs: one tells you what the science found, the other tells you what the city decided every future owner has a right to know upfront.
The Financing Terms That Come With the Discount
Ruis has said publicly that he intends to sell the single-family homes in Teakettle Heights below market rate, in the $550,000 to $600,000 range, with an alternative financing package: 2% down and a mortgage rate under the prevailing market rate, subject to approval. He's also said no bulk or investor buying will be allowed, which is a meaningful restriction if your plan involves acquiring multiple units or renting the property out immediately.
That combination is worth slowing down for. Below-market pricing paired with seller-arranged financing terms usually means the deal structure looks different from a conventional mortgage through an outside lender, and appraisal, comparable-sales analysis, and loan approval can all move differently when the seller is also the financing source. If you're planning to use your own bank rather than Ruis's financing package, ask early whether the below-market price and the financing terms are bundled or separable, and whether a conventional appraisal will support the number on the contract given what similar new construction is listing for elsewhere in Columbia Falls, where the median list price per square foot was running around $390 in May 2026 according to market tracking sites.
The Timeline Still Running Next Door
The consent decree that governs the actual cleanup of the retained CFAC parcel was lodged in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana on July 2, 2026, under the case name United States and State of Montana v. Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC. The agreement puts the cleanup cost at $57,634,528, split between CFAC's parent company Glencore and the Atlantic Richfield Company, a BP America subsidiary, and it has to clear a public comment period and a federal judge's review before it's officially entered. That comment period closed in early August 2026, and as of this writing the docket had not yet shown the judge's final sign-off, the step that actually makes the decree binding.
Even once it is approved, Peter Metcalf of the Coalition for a Clean CFAC testified at the May 2026 planning commission meeting that the EPA's own timeline doesn't put the start of physical remediation work, the slurry wall, the landfill capping, before late 2026 or early 2027. That means anyone closing on a home in or near Teakettle Heights this year is buying into a neighborhood where heavy construction equipment, slurry wall installation, and long-term groundwater monitoring wells will be active features of daily life for the next several years, running on a separate but overlapping schedule from the homebuilding itself. The EPA has also secured a long-term easement to access the monitoring wells regardless of who owns the land, so that monitoring presence isn't going away once the cleanup wraps up either.
Five Questions Worth Asking Before You Write an Offer
- Has the seller or builder shown you the actual CC&R language disclosing the Superfund history, not just a verbal assurance that "it's been cleared"?
- If you're financing through Ruis's package, what happens to the interest rate and down payment terms if you refinance or sell within the first few years?
- Is the lot you're considering inside the 78-acre Teakettle Heights parcel the EPA specifically cleared, or adjacent to land still owned by Glencore?
- What does your lender's appraisal say about the below-market list price relative to comparable new construction elsewhere in Columbia Falls?
- Has the remediation timeline for the retained CFAC parcel changed since the consent decree was lodged in July 2026, and where can you verify that directly?
That last one matters more than it looks. The EPA's Region 8 office and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality both maintain public pages on the consent decree and the underlying Record of Decision, and checking them directly, rather than relying on secondhand summaries, is the fastest way to know whether anything has moved since this was written.
None of this means Teakettle Heights is a bad place to buy. It means the questions worth asking aren't about contamination risk the EPA has already ruled on. They're about wells, covenants, financing structure, and a construction calendar that's still being finalized in federal court. A buyer who walks in asking the right five questions is in a much stronger position than one who walks in asking whether the land is "safe," because that question has already been answered, and it isn't the one that determines how smoothly your closing goes.
If you're weighing a lot in this corridor against something else in Columbia Falls, Whitefish, or elsewhere in the Flathead Valley, the Cecil Waatti Team at MTN Investments can walk through the actual recorded documents with you before you write an offer, not after. Work With Us.
